A Response to Paul Raeburn's Disapproval of Our Story, "Patient Zero"

UPDATE: Stephanie tragically died on the morning of February 4, 2015. She is survived by two daughters and leaves behind a legacy of hope and resilience. Read more about here life here and please consider donating to the fund established in her memory here.

As a former science writer for Businessweek and now a blogger for the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, Raeburn has a beat cop's idea of what journalism can be — if he doesn't understand something, he's swinging the night-stick. What is it that Raeburn doesn't understand? Well, two things. The first is writing, of which he's clearly suspicious. The second, though, is humanity, which is what makes his entry into that most self-congratulatory journalistic genre — the online "takedown" — grotesque.

We'd be inclined to forgive him the first, if it didn't lead to the second. Raeburn has gone after Esquire before, for the crime of being "manly" and "ultrahip." The man has a way with language that leads him to be resentful of language, and so it is that we stand accused of writing prose with "flash" and "radiance"; of perpetrating a "crackling narrative"; of relying on "swaggering storytelling," and "constant straining for edgy metaphor"; and, finally, of this: "the story is gripping and the characters are engaging." We'll take it, we'd normally say; but in Raeburn's world, what seems like the language of praise is actually the language of dismissal. Our efforts to create a vivid portrayal of Stephanie Lee's life and Eric Schadt's science not only render us less than serious in Raeburn's eyes; they render us suspect.

Tom is suspect for "cribbing" his portrait of Eric Schadt from an earlier profile in Esquire that Tom himself wrote. Mostly, though, he is suspect for writing a 12-year-old portrait of REM singer Michael Stipe that he "later admitted making up." There was no later; the original story's subhed told the reader the story was half fiction. Esquire also provided a concurrent online annotation of the story that indicated which elements of the story were fictional and which were not. In any event, there are no contested facts in the story we wrote about Stephanie Lee; nor does Raeburn contest them. Instead, he uses the Stipe story to cast doubt on the veracity of "Patient Zero" by inference.

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It is but the first of Raeburn's ad hominem attacks, for now the beat-cop clearly thinks he's found something fishy going on here, and takes it upon himself to question Mark's relationship to Stephanie Lee. This is what he says:

What's curious, however, is Lee's attachment to Warren. They seem to be more than Facebook friends. They seem like close friends. Junod and Warren don't say that, but one wonders: How did Lee, who lives in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, on the Gulf, connect with Schadt on the Upper East Side of Manhattan?

This is either prurient (is something being implied?) or obtuse (the story explains exactly how the connection between Lee and Schadt was made). Either way, it's unforgivable. There are very few people who have read the story who do not glean that we mentioned Stephanie's case to Eric when we write that "Schadt lifted his eyes and said, 'That's exactly the kind of patient we take.'" If Raeburn needed more disclosure, he could have found it in the editor's letter that David Granger wrote to accompany the story, or in the update that we published on esquire.com the week after the story was published.

To set the record straight: Mark is indeed more than a Facebook friend to Stephanie Lee. He is a true friend. He believes that she is an extraordinary woman, and he has done everything he possibly can to get her treatment better than the treatment available to her at the medical center at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi. The story didn't begin as a story; it began as an unabashed act of advocacy for a human being who needed help, and it became a story only when we came to believe that the help offered by Eric Schadt and the Icahn Instiute shed light on virtually every aspect of treatment available to cancer patients in late 2013. There is in fact reason to be hopeful about the "personalized" approach to cancer practiced by Eric Schadt and others; and we are in fact living in a time when one model for cancer treatment is giving way to another. That is the story we reported meticulously over six months of time and recounted honestly in "Patient Zero," but that is somehow the story that raises Raeburn's suspicions — the story that bizarrely arouses his contempt.

And it is his voiced and unvoiced suspicion of our motives that makes Raeburn's post so peculiar. He glosses over the fact that at its heart our story details the effort of many people — not just Eric Schadt — to help someone who needed help; at the same time, that is what bugs him. Once again, you can hear the journalistic beat cop: "Hey, what's going on here?" Maybe Raeburn never kept alive a relationship with a subject after writing one of his stories at Businessweek, but we can tell him that at Esquire it's not so unusual a practice, since, for all our "manly ultrahipness" we regard journalism as a very human transaction, and, if at all possible, we keep in touch. We plan to keep in touch with Stephanie Lee and Eric Schadt and Ross Cagan; indeed, "Patient Zero" is not intended as the last word on cancer treatment, but rather as the first in a series of stories that follows Stephanie Lee through the completion of her "standard of care" and beyond. David Granger makes the long-term nature of the project clear in his editor's letter; but Raeburn is too busy prosecuting his case to care.

Instead, he accuses us of being "heartless," for saying that patients with terminal diagnoses die. He accuses us of cruelty, not only to readers with cancer but to Stephanie Lee. First of all, we were echoing the hopeless voices of the doctors and case managers who have been providing Stephanie's conventional chemotherapy. Second, Raeburn commits an actual "heartless error," ending his piece with what seems a cynical quote from Eric Schadt about Stephanie Lee having a "one in 1,000" chance of survival, when that quote is actually derived from early in the story, before Schadt began his analysis of Stephanie's tumor. The author of an Internet takedown doesn't get to congratulate himself unless he delivers what he thinks is a good thrashing, but there's something odd, something smacking of projection, in Raeburn's relentless impugning of what we set out to do when we first connected a cancer patient in Mississippi with a scientist in New York.

Paul Raeburn has no business accusing us of cruelty to Stephanie Lee, or of what he seems to imagine as something untoward. Stephanie reached out to us; we responded, then so did some very smart and dedicated people; along the way, we wrote a story that attempted to do the difficult job of dramatizing the medical potential of "big data." If Raeburn doesn't like how we did it, fine: it won't be the first time Esquire has been accused of swagger, hyperbole, or overheated prose. If he doesn't think the story is well-reported, we would disagree, respectfully. But to accuse us of human failures in the reporting and writing of "Patient Zero" goes well over the line, especially when his piece is replete with human failures all his own.